Analysis of texture characteristics associated with visual complexity perception

In our previous work we determined that five important characteristics affect the perception of visual complexity of a texture: regularity, roughness, directionality, density, and understandability. In this paper, a set of objective methods for measuring these characteristics is proposed: regularity is estimated by an autocorrelation function; roughness is computed based on local changes; directionality is measured by the maximum line-likeness of edges in different directions; and density is calculated from the edge density. Our analysis shows a significant correlation between the objective measures and subjective evaluations. In addition, for the estimation of understandability, a new approach is proposed. We asked the respondents to name each texture, and then we sorted all these names into different types, including names that were similar. We discovered that understandability is affected by two factors of a texture: the maximum number of similar names assigned to a specific type and the total number of types.